Monthly Archives: December 2012

We are delighted to announce that Dacher Keltner, Ph.D., has joined the Advisory Board of the Integrative Law Institute. A leading researcher and scholar in the relatively new field of positive psychology, Dacher is the executive editor of Greater Good, the founding faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center, and a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the author of Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life and a co-editor of The Compassionate Instinct: The Science of Human Goodness. His prolific research and writing have helped to transform our understanding of what it means to be human by investigating positive attributes such as compassion, empathy, cooperation, and altruism as the evolutionary endowment that enabled our survival and flourishing as a species, and that make us–well–human.

Here is a description of the domain of positive psychology that makes it clear why ILI includes basic elements of positive psychology in its programming for lawyers:

Positive Psychology is the scientific study of the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive. . . . This field is founded on the belief that people want to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives, to cultivate what is best within themselves, and to enhance their experiences of love, work, and play.

Positive Psychology has three central concerns: positive emotions, positive individual traits, and positive institutions. Understanding positive emotions entails the study of contentment with the past, happiness in the present, and hope for the future. Understanding positive individual traits consists of the study of the strengths and virtues, such as the capacity for love and work, courage, compassion, resilience, creativity, curiosity, integrity, self-knowledge, moderation, self-control, and wisdom. Understanding positive institutions entails the study of the strengths that foster better communities, such as justice, responsibility, civility, parenting, nurturance, work ethic, leadership, teamwork, purpose, and tolerance.

Dacher Keltner’s research interests include not only the workings of emotion and power in social relationships (areas of obvious relevance to lawyers whose clients are experiencing legal issues that arise from fractured human relationships) but also human morality. Here is how he describes that aspect of his work:

My final research interest lies in the study of how humans negotiate moral concerns. Here I have examined how opposing partisans tend to assume that they alone see the issues objectively and in principled fashion, a tendency we call “naive realism”. We have shown that opposing partisans attribute extremism and bias to their opponents.

In studies of moral judgment, I have shown how emotions such as anger, sadness, and fear influence judgments of causality, fairness, and risk. More recently, I have begun to study the contents of three moral domains – autonomy, community, and purity – and how these domains relate to emotion and prejudice.

Morality, “neuro-morality,” and positive psychology are vectors that ILI includes in its programs teaching Integrative Law. It is exciting and gratifying for us to have the support of one of the most creative scholars in the field.

Mohandas Gandhi is well known and even revered for pioneering the use of non-violent passive resistance for large-scale political purposes. Less well known is his early career as a London-trained lawyer, captured in this remarkable photograph.

He rejected “business as usual” adversarial litigation, in favor of looking to heal the roots of conflict in the hearts of his clients experiencing personal disputes. It was in the course of fighting as a lawyer for the civil rights of Muslim and Hindu Indians in South Africa that he was given a copy of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience to read while in jail. Out of this grew Gandhi’s development of new techniques for mass nonviolent civil disobedience that became his life work.

We at ILI are putting together a gallery of contrarian heroes of the legal profession who understood, long before mediation or ADR had names, that the highest and deepest calling of a lawyer working in the realm of personal disputes is to heal breaches in the social fabric that manifest as legal issues but gather their destructive force from fractured human relationships.

We begin with Gandhi, and we invite you to send us quotations and links to your personal favorite legal heroes in the evolution of what we now call Integrative Law. We’ll add those we especially like to the ILI Gallery.

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Why should lawyers and other dispute resolution professionals become neuro-literate? On January 12, 2013, lawyers, mediators, and colleagues from allied professions (financial planning, psychology, and family counseling) will join me in San Francisco for an all-day workshop, called

Join us at that workshop for some fascinating new tools and perspectives that begin to answer the question.

Underlying everything I teach, including this January workshop, is my profound belief that providing legal counsel that genuinely helps our clients with personal disputes to reach deep, durable resolution requires us legal professionals to go back to the roots of what we believe our job description is and why we believe that.

For more than twenty years I represented clients in personal dispute resolution the hardball way, taking domestic relations and other matters through trial and appellate courts. For nearly as many years after that I’ve been a leader in the movement that has produced–among other important changes–promulgation of the Uniform Collaborative Law Act. What I know in my bones is that our clients whose legal disputes grow out of fractured human relationships need from their lawyers a vision, a sense of responsibility, and a practical toolbox that law schools don’t teach us and that we can’t learn in court.

If clients make appointments with a litigator, they tend to get litigation, and if it’s an appointment with a mediator, they tend to get mediation. Ethical practitioners make time to explain the breadth of legal dispute resolution process choices available to clients, but we cannot help bringing our own preferences and cognitive biases into the conversation, much as we may strive to keep the focus on the client. I’ve come to be somewhat skeptical of the very idea of neutrality, given the sneaky persistence of cognitive biases and other quirks of how our brains are wired, however good our intentions may be.

What’s a conscientious lawyer or mediator to do about this? There isn’t a short and sweet “magic bullet,” but there is an answer: we can begin the process of understandingthe difference between legal dispute resolution and human conflict resolution from a dynamic systems perspective.

That perspective begins with the reality that every new case calls into being a unique system consisting of the clients and every one of their professional helpers, as well as everyone else they consult (family members, friends, therapists, colleagues, online chat room and forum acquaintances, and more–the “Greek Chorus”). Every member of that system alters the narrative of the conflict, and dynamically shifts the process of resolution, with every communication and every interaction.

We lawyers tend to look at our clients’ problems as legal issues, and as entirely theirs. We implicitly see ourselves as a constant, always rational and always focused on getting the job done in ways that do not require much inner work, personal reflection, or conscious awareness of ourselves as members of that dynamic system. We imagine that our job is exclusively to be persuasive, analytic and efficient, and to keep the focus solely on settling the legal issues. Anything the clients do that impedes that progress interferes with us doing the job we were hired for.

It’s just plain not so. We are trained to litigate or settle legal disputes, but our clients often come to us embroiled in far more complex human conflicts. Just because the client made an appointment with a lawyer doesn’t mean that what we learned in law school is what they need most from us. Legal disputes can be resolved by pieces of paper called settlement agreements and judgments, but human conflicts need to be healed.

We lawyers alter the possibilities for process and outcome every time we interact with anyone in the system.

The less consciously aware we are of ourselves–including our capacities, our habits, our beliefs, our emotions, and more– as a force that alters the potentialities of the unique system in ways operating below our rational awareness and intentions, the less able we are to marshal our own full potential as conflict resolution professionals.

The less aware we are of ourselves as conscious participants in a dynamic conflict resolution system, the less able we are to maximize the conditions that might lead to genuinely positive and meaningful outcomes for our clients–including, but not limited to settling the legal issues we abstract from their stories.

NeuroLiteracy 101 is ILI’s introductory workshop. It’s purpose is introducing this new perspective and this new toolbox to lawyers and others who have learned to prioritize reason to the detriment of appreciating how the interactions of all parts of our complex human brains affect our work.

Participants can receive 6 hours of California MCLE credit. CEU’s for mental health professionals will be available for a small administrative fee.